Measuring Energy Efficiency
Energy
efficient computers are a good thing, so it helps to know how power efficient,
or power hungry different parts of a computer are when stressed with different
tasks. Since it is very difficult to isolate a videocard or CPU and measure
power draw separately, PCSTATS measures total system power draw with the aid of
an Extech 380803 AC Power Analyzer and A-PFC compliant PC Power and Cooling 750W power supply. The meter is
placed between the 120V AC outlet and the PC power supply. By stressing the test
platform's graphics solution or processor, it's then possible to measure power
draw relative to the PC at an idle state.
The test
system is measured at Idle (Windows desktop), Graphics Loaded (3Dmark06) and CPU
Loaded (Prime 95) states.
|
Total System Power Draw
 ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 |
|
Graphics Solution |
Idle
|
Graphics
Loaded |
CPU
Loaded
|
|
AMD HD
4290
(Integrated Graphics) |
83w |
120w |
152w |
|
nVidia Geforce GTS250
(Discrete Graphics)
|
139w |
246w |
206w |
|
(At desktop) |
(via 3Dmark 06) |
(via
Prime95) | |
Even though the AMD 890GX chipset bumps
the speed of the graphics core to 700Mhz, the ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 system
draws relatively little power under load on IGP alone. Idle power draw
is just 83 Watts.
HD Tach is a physical performance hard drive test for Windows. In Windows
9X/ME it uses a special kernel mode VXD to get maximum accuracy by bypassing the
file system. A similar mechanism is used in Windows NT/2000/XP. HD Tach reads
from areas all over the hard drive and reports an average speed. It also logs
the read speeds to a text file that you can load into a spreadsheet and graph to
visually read the results of the test.
| HD Tach 3.0.4.0 |
|
Burst |
Random Access
|
Average
Read |
AMD 890GX / SB850 SATA 6Gb/s
(ASUS M4A89GTD-Pro/USB3)
|
333.9 MB/s |
17 ms |
114.4 MB/s |
Intel P55 / Marvell SE9128 SATA 6Gb/s
(Gigabyte
P55A-UD6) |
291.5 MB/s |
17 ms |
115.5
MB/s | |
The native AMD SB850 implementation seems
to be a touch faster in the Burst test than the Marvell-to-Intel P55 Express
implementation used on the Gigabyte P55A-UD6 motherboard.
 SiSoft Sandra 2009 - Hard Drive Read
Tests |
Source: Sandra |
| |
Sandra is designed to test the theoretical power of
a complete system as well as the individual components. The results are also
purely theoretical and may not represent real world performance.
Single
hard drive compared to single hard dive, SATA 6GB/s vs SATA 3GB/s, shows a nice
boost from the Seagate Barracuda XT under the AMD SB850 SATA 6Gb/s III
implementation. On the other hand, RAID 0 SATAII is quite a bit faster than a
lone SATA III hard drive!
Prelude to
Benchmarks
The details of how the ASUS M4A89GTD
PRO/USB3 motherboard test system was configured for benchmarking; the specific hardware, software drivers,
operating system and benchmark versions is indicated below. In the second column are the
general specs for the reference platforms this AMD 890GX based motherboard
is to be compared against.
Please take a moment to look over
PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark
results on the next page.
 |
| PCSTATS Test System Configurations |
|
|
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